ZANZIBAR IS BURNING DOWN
Zanzibar is burning down.
I saw it on Facebook,
which is apparently how a city tells you now
that one of its organs has failed.
No bell.
No man running up Yonge yelling fire.
Just somebody’s phone held sideways
and black smoke climbing through the frame
behind the gold woman
who has been stepping out over the sidewalk
for longer than most of the condos around her
have been alive.
Zanzibar is burning down.
And the first thing Toronto will do
is call it a building.
359 Yonge Street.
Commercial property.
Three alarm.
Road closure.
Structural damage.
Cause unknown.
All those little clean words
we invented because things are easier
when nothing has a body.
But this place has always had a body.
That’s practically the problem.
They built it in 1895
for undertakers.
Young & Millard.
Caskets upstairs.
Morgue downstairs.
Imagine that.
Before the tits
there were corpses.
Before the pole
there was the table.
Before somebody slipped a twenty
into somebody’s garter
somebody else was paying
to put their mother in a box.
Same building.
That isn’t symbolism.
That’s Toronto.
We don’t tear the old purpose out.
We drywall over it.
Put another licence on the door.
Eventually there was food.
Then liquor.
Jazz.
R&B.
Rock and roll.
Girls dancing beside the band.
Then girls without the band.
At one point the liquor laws required food
so there was apparently a ham sandwich
that went around the room
from table to table,
uneaten,
performing compliance.
I love that fucking sandwich.
I hope somebody saved it.
Patron saint of Toronto.
One piece of bread
passing through everybody’s hands
so the government could say
desire had been served with lunch.
Then the city got taller.
Cleaner.
More expensive.
Every square foot learned
how much it was worth.
Sam the Record Man went dark.
The signs came down.
Honest Ed’s went into memory.
Yonge Street started wearing glass
like it had somewhere better to be.
And Zanzibar—
stupid, gold, horny Zanzibar—
stayed.
Ten-karat glazed tile.
Stars.
Neon.
A giant woman over the entrance
with one leg extended
like she owned the fucking street.
Which she did.
You could hate it.
You could laugh at it.
You could spend forty years pretending
you had never looked up.
But you knew where you were
when you saw her.
That matters.
Cities need things
that cannot be mistaken
for anywhere else.
And Zanzibar was never anywhere else.
It was exactly there.
Yonge Street.
Toronto.
Women going in for work.
Men going in pretending
they weren’t lonely.
Tourists taking pictures.
Bay Street boys.
Students.
Regulars.
Bartenders.
Bouncers.
Cleaners.
Dancers counting money
under fluorescent light
after the fantasy was finished.
That’s the part
I don’t want anybody cleaning up now.
Those women worked.
Their bodies were not
the building’s mythology.
Their bodies paid bills.
Rent.
Food.
Phone.
Child care.
Debt.
Shoes.
A cab home at four in the morning
because sometimes getting home alive
costs more than the TTC.
Do not turn them into neon.
Do not turn them into
the colourful history of Yonge Street.
They were working.
There were men downstairs once too.
Bodies everywhere.
Bodies looking.
Bodies being looked at.
Bodies converting loneliness into currency.
Bodies surviving another week.
A whole economy
with its clothes off.
And underneath them,
the old morgue.
Of course.
The dead beneath the living
while the living danced
to stay living.
Tell me Toronto
has ever written a better sentence.
Someone once danced there
as the Queen of the Fire.
She ate flame.
I don’t know what to do with that now.
So I won’t do anything with it.
I’ll leave it where it is.
Queen of the Fire.
Zanzibar.
The roof burning.
Sometimes history
doesn’t need a metaphor.
Sometimes the metaphor
gets there first
and waits eighty years
for the fire department.
This morning
smoke came through the roof.
The windows opened wrong.
Water went where liquor went.
Ash settled on the gold.
And somewhere behind all of that
the old building remembered every version
of what we asked it to hold.
The dead.
The drunk.
The band.
The dancer.
The lonely.
The horny.
The broke.
The beautiful.
The ridiculous.
The man with a twenty.
The woman earning it.
The sandwich nobody wanted.
The corpse somebody loved.
The stripper somebody loved.
The stripper somebody was.
Maybe that’s what I’m angry about.
Not that something old is burning.
Old things burn.
Old things fall down.
Toronto is excellent at helping.
I’m angry because
we keep acting surprised
when memory turns out to have an address.
We think history is Queen’s Park.
Casa Loma.
A plaque screwed into brick.
A black-and-white photograph
of important men wearing hats.
No.
Sometimes history has tits.
Sometimes history smells like perfume
and beer
and bleach at four in the morning.
Sometimes history has a dressing room.
Sometimes history walks out the employee entrance
with sore feet
and cash folded somewhere safe.
Sometimes history is tacky as hell.
Sometimes history is gold tile
on Yonge Street.
Sometimes history is a woman
forty feet over your head
who has been taking the same impossible step
for decades
and never once
put her foot down.
Until today.
Zanzibar is burning down.
Not metaphorically.
Not eventually.
Not in the careful language
we’ll use after.
It is burning down
while Toronto is still standing around it.
And tomorrow somebody will ask
what should replace it.
They always do.
As if absence is a development opportunity.
As if every wound
is really just available frontage.
As if the city cannot bear
one square metre
that isn’t becoming something else.
But tonight
I don’t want the rendering.
I don’t want the proposal.
I don’t want the heritage strategy.
I don’t want some fucking condominium
called
THE ZANZIBAR
with brushed brass lettering
and a cocktail lounge in the lobby
selling a seventeen-dollar drink
named after a woman
who used to work there.
Leave it.
For one night,
leave the hole open.
Let Yonge Street look directly into itself.
Let the glass towers see
what they replaced.
Let the morgue
and the stage
and the dressing room
and the bar
and the gold woman
occupy the same ruined air.
Let the city smell like itself.
Let everybody who ever looked up
admit they looked.
Let everybody who ever worked there
remain larger than the story
we are about to tell about them.
And if she comes down—
the gold woman—
do not say
she finally fell.
She didn’t.
Toronto burned
the place beneath her.
There is a difference.
Joshua W.J. Brown is a Toronto-based writer and filmmaker. His recent work has appeared in Canadian Dimension, and his poetry has been accepted for publication by The Wise Owl.
